— For Heads of CRO & Heads of Growth

Qualitative data for the team running CRO
on Shopify.

Your A/B tool tells you which variant won. GA4 tells you the conversion rate dipped. Neither tells you why. Propel Replays is the Shopify-shaped qualitative layer that fits into your existing CRO stack — segment-level replays, mobile-vs-desktop heatmap diffs, AI-summarized sessions, and 0ms Core Web Vitals impact. 7,000+ Shopify stores. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo.

Install free on Shopify See the four problems CRO leads solve with it

SEGMENT BY ANY SHOPIFY FIELD · 0MS IMPACT ON CORE WEB VITALS · AI-SUMMARIZED SESSIONS · 4.9★ FROM 7,000+ MERCHANTS

— What CRO leads need

What CRO leads actually need from a session-replay tool.

Most session-replay tools were built for product teams at SaaS companies. CRO leads on Shopify need something different.

Quantitative tells you what — conversion rate dipped, the mobile cart-to-checkout fell off a cliff last Tuesday, paid traffic from the new creative bounces 40% harder than the control. (For the benchmarks behind "is this dip even real?", our 2026 average ecommerce conversion rate piece covers the numbers most Shopify CRO programs are actually measuring against.) Qualitative tells you why. Without the why, you're testing variants against assumption instead of observation, and you're spending six weeks proving a hypothesis you could have falsified in an afternoon.

What CRO leads on Shopify specifically need: segment-level replay filtering that maps to actual Shopify primitives (paid vs. organic, repeat vs. new customer, cart value brackets, UTM source, order tags, device). Replay-bound evidence you can paste into a stakeholder deck — five 30-second clips beat a paragraph of opinion. Clean exports for decision documents — share links that work without a login, one-click CSV export from the dashboard, AI summaries copyable as plain text. Proactive surfacing so insight alerts and product-page ATC-rate alerts flag the issues worth investigating before you have to go looking. And no Lighthouse penalty, because every CRO lead is fighting for milliseconds and the last thing the program needs is a tracking script that costs more conversions than it saves.

Generic SaaS replay tools — Hotjar, FullStory, Microsoft Clarity — weren't built for any of this. Their filters don't speak Shopify. Their scripts slow the storefront. Their UI is multi-platform by default. Propel Replays was built specifically for Shopify-shaped CRO work, by a team that runs Shopify stores.

— The 4 problems CRO leads solve with Replays

Four problems that show up in every Shopify CRO program.

If your testing roadmap, stakeholder deck, or weekly growth review touches any of these, this is what Replays is for.

Problem 01

A/B tests are ambiguous — the same variant wins on one segment and loses on another.

Variant A wins on mobile by 4%. Variant B wins on desktop by 6%. Aggregate result is flat. You can't ship either, and you don't know why the segments diverged.

What you do with Replays

Pull the mobile-vs-desktop heatmap diff for the test page to see where attention diverges by device. Then filter replays into each segment — Variant A on mobile, Variant B on desktop — using device, UTM, customer tag, and cart value. The mobile replays on Variant A reveal that the new sticky CTA covers the variant picker on iPhone, so visitors can't pick a size and bail. The desktop replays on Variant B show the new layout finally puts shipping info above the fold, which the desktop cohort needed and the mobile cohort had anyway.

You don't ship Variant A or B. You ship Variant C — desktop layout from B, mobile fix from learning what broke A. Without segment-level qualitative data, that test was a wasted six-week cycle.

Problem 02

Stakeholder presentations need evidence, not opinion.

You've identified PDP friction. The founder, the brand lead, and the dev team all need to agree to fix it. "We think the PDP needs work" loses the room. You need evidence.

What you do with Replays

Filter to mobile sessions on the bestseller PDP that didn't add to cart. Pick the five most representative replays. Drop the share links straight into your decision doc or deck. Stakeholders click through, watch a 45-second clip each, and arrive at the same conclusion you did — without you having to re-explain.

"Here are five replays of the friction we identified" lands differently than "we think the PDP needs work." The dev sees the bug. The brand lead sees the missing trust signal. The founder sees lost revenue. You get headcount approval for the fix instead of another debate.

Problem 03

Paid traffic is leaking and the PMM wants attribution.

Meta CPA is up 30% on the new creative. The PMM wants to know whether it's the creative, the audience, or the landing experience. GA4 says "landing page bounce rate is 65%" — and stops there.

What you do with Replays

Segment replays by UTM source and campaign. Watch the first 30 post-click sessions on the new creative. The pattern is obvious within the first ten: the creative promised "new collection" but the landing page is the homepage, which still hero-features last quarter's collection. The friction isn't the creative — it's the URL the creative points at.

You hand the PMM three replays and a one-line recommendation: point the new creative at the new collection landing page, not the homepage. CPA recovers in 48 hours. The next attribution conversation starts with replay-bound evidence, not a debate.

Problem 04

Mobile and desktop are different stores in disguise.

70% of your traffic is mobile. Most of your CRO testing happens in a desktop browser. The two surfaces share a theme but behave like different stores — and the gap is hidden in aggregate metrics.

What you do with Replays

Pull the mobile-vs-desktop heatmap diff for any page. The differences jump out: on desktop, attention concentrates on the variant picker and the reviews block; on mobile, neither is in the median scroll depth. Visitors are buying based on the hero image and the price alone — every other trust signal is below the fold and never seen.

You build a mobile-first PDP variant that promotes reviews and trust signals above the fold. The next test wins +8% on mobile alone. Without the heatmap diff, that hypothesis would never have surfaced — the desktop session you ran the audit in showed nothing wrong.

— Real merchants on Replays

7,000+ Shopify stores. 4.9★ across hundreds of reviews.

"Genuinely helpful suggestions that actually improve conversion, not just generic advice."

Pixel Burn Custom Laser Creations

Shopify App Store review

"Designed in a way that's tailored to how shop owners use this kind of data. Having qualitative data like session replays is essential."

Strudel3D

Switched from Hotjar

"More features and metrics available than other replay apps I have used so far."

Cask & Cotton

Shopify App Store review

— A weekly cadence

A CRO workflow with Replays — what a typical week looks like.

This is the cadence most CRO leads converge on within the first month. Adapt to your sprint shape; the rhythm holds.

Monday

Start with the insight-alert queue and last week's underperforming segment

Insight alerts surface the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts, and biggest abandoned checkouts — the highest-value sessions to watch first. Pair that with one underperforming segment — say, mobile + paid + cart abandoners — pull 50 replays, and skim each two-sentence AI summary. Flag the 5–8 that show recurring friction patterns. Total time: 25 minutes.

Tuesday

Share 3-5 replay links with the team in Slack

Drop the highest-signal replays into #cro or your test-planning doc. Each link works without a Propel login on the recipient's end. Stakeholders watch on their own time and reply with reactions, not "can you re-explain this in a meeting."

Wednesday

A/B test the highest-confidence fix

The replay pattern from Monday becomes the hypothesis. You write the variant in your A/B tool (Intelligems, Convert, Shopify's native testing) with a one-line "this is the friction we observed; this variant removes it." Test ships by EOD.

Thursday

Watch the first 50 sessions on the new variant

Don't wait for statistical significance to start watching. Filter replays to the variant cohort. Catch any new friction the variant introduced (broken layout on iPad, conflict with another app) before the test runs for two weeks against a bug.

Friday

Review the heatmap delta — control vs variant, mobile vs desktop

End the week with the heatmap diff. Where did attention shift? Which CTA got more clicks; which got fewer? File the screenshots in the test's decision doc — they'll be the qualitative evidence in next month's readout, win or lose.

Monthly

Roll the qualitative evidence into the CRO readout

Aggregate the month's replay-bound evidence into the readout for leadership. Win rate goes up. "Why did we ship this variant?" gets answered with a replay link, not a paragraph. Stakeholder trust in the program compounds.

— Slots into your stack

We slot into your CRO stack. We don't replace it.

You already have an analytics stack. Replays is the qualitative layer that fits between the tools you've got.

A typical Shopify CRO stack: GA4 for quantitative behaviour, Shopify Analytics for sales and order data, Replays for qualitative session evidence, an A/B testing tool of your choice (Intelligems, Convert, Shopify's native testing, or a custom build for Shopify Plus). Each layer answers a different question. None of them is redundant; none of them is replaceable by another.

Propel doesn't try to be your analytics platform. It doesn't try to be your A/B tool. We slot in for the qualitative layer the rest of your stack is missing — segment-aware replays with filters that map to actual Shopify primitives, click-and-area heatmaps with mobile-vs-desktop diff, AI-summarized sessions, and proactive insight + product-page alerts so you don't have to hand-triage to find the signal. Install in 30 seconds, no GTM, no theme.liquid edits, 0ms Lighthouse impact. The stack you already have keeps doing what it does. Replays adds the missing why.

— FAQ

CRO lead FAQ

How does Propel fit into a Shopify A/B testing workflow?

Propel sits upstream and downstream of your A/B tool, not in place of it. Upstream: replays + heatmaps tell you which hypothesis is worth testing in the first place — you spot the friction, then write the variant. Downstream: when the test ends, filter replays to each variant cohort and watch what's actually different in user behaviour. Most CRO leads run Propel alongside an A/B tool like Intelligems, Convert, or Shopify's native testing — Propel is the qualitative layer their A/B tool doesn't ship.

Can I export replay segments for my CRO decision docs?

Yes. Each replay has a shareable link you can drop into Notion, Loom, Linear, or a deck. Filter replays to a segment — say, mobile + paid traffic + cart abandoners — and copy the share links for the five most representative sessions. Stakeholders open them in the browser; no Propel login required to watch a shared replay. Replays also export as one-click CSV from the dashboard for the segments you want to keep around. AI summaries are copyable as plain text.

Does Replays integrate with my analytics stack (GA4, Mixpanel)?

Replays sits next to GA4 and Mixpanel rather than replacing them. We're the qualitative layer; they're the quantitative one. You'll find UTM parameters, referrer, device, and Shopify customer/order context inside Propel for filtering. Most CRO teams use the same flow: spot the drop in GA4, jump to Propel to watch the why, document the fix in Linear or Notion, then validate the change with their A/B tool.

Will Replays slow down my Shopify storefront?

No. Propel Replays measures 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. The tracking script ships as a Shopify theme app embed — Shopify injects it at the bottom of the page after everything else has loaded, async. Lighthouse scores are identical with Replays installed and disabled. For CRO leads who treat LCP as a conversion lever, this is the differentiator versus most session-replay tools that ship a render-blocking script.

How do CRO teams typically split work across replays vs heatmaps?

Heatmaps for the page-level pattern; replays for the session-level story. Heatmaps tell you where attention concentrates and where dead clicks pile up — critical for above-the-fold decisions and CTA placement. Replays tell you why a specific cohort behaved a specific way — critical for diagnosing checkout friction, broken interactions, and segment-specific drop-off. The Shopify-customer-field filtering lives on replays, not heatmaps, so most CRO teams start each week with the mobile-vs-desktop heatmap diff, then drill into segmented replays — paid traffic, returning customers, high-AOV carts — to investigate the anomalies.

Can multiple team members access the same Replays dashboard?

Yes. Anyone added to your Shopify admin as a staff account gets Replays access automatically — no separate seat licensing, no per-user fees. CRO leads, growth PMs, devs, agency partners, and the founder can all watch the same replay, leave comments, and pull the same segment filters. Sharing a single replay link works without a Propel login on the recipient's end, so stakeholders outside the Shopify admin can still see your evidence.

What's the typical CRO ROI on adding qualitative data?

It depends on the maturity of your CRO program, but the rough pattern is: stores running A/B tests without qualitative data ship more failed variants than they need to, because they're guessing at the hypothesis. Adding session replay typically improves test win rate (winning variants per ten tests run) by 15–30%, because each test starts from observed friction rather than assumption. The bigger ROI is speed — you stop running month-long tests against weak hypotheses.